Creatural Fictions

Human-Animal Relationships in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature

David Herman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137520661
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137518118
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume explores how twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary texts engage with relationships between humans and other animals. Written by forward-thinking early-career scholars, as well as established experts in the field, the chapters discuss key texts in the emergent canon of animal narratives, including Franz Kafka's animal stories, Yann Martel's The Life of Pi, Zakes Mda's The Whale Caller, and others. The volume is divided into four main sections. Two period-focused sections center on modernism and on late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction, while two further sections foreground the more general project of theory building in literary animal studies, examining interconnections among concepts of species, sexuality, gender, and genre. The volume also raises issues that extend beyond the academic community, including ethical dimensions of human-animal relationships and the problems of species loss and diminishing biodiversity.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Literature beyond the Human
• Part I Literary Modernisms, Animal Worlds, and Trans-species Entanglements
• Part II Literature beyond the Human I: Species, Sexuality, and Gender
• Part III Literature beyond the Human II: Human-Animal Interactions across Genres
• Part IV Human-Animal Entanglements in Late-Twentieth- and Early-Twenty-First-Century Fiction
• List of Contributors
• Index